“In my books I’m trying to make the comic and the serious rub up against each other just as closely and uncomfortably as I can,” says author Richard Russo. Readers of his novels can attest to the power and beauty of these jarring juxtapositions. Critics have compared Russo’s mastery to that of Sinclair Lewis, and Esquire extolled his elegiac portraits of declining small towns by dubbing him the “Stendahl of blue-collar America.”

Bridge of Sighs (2007), his most recent novel, returns to the theme that haunts Russo’s earlier works: how do the places and experiences that define and nurture us also limit and inhibit us?

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